Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

Nam, si luxerit, ad librariorum

Curram scrinia, Cæsios, Aquinos

Suffenum, omnia colligam venena,

Ac te his suppliciis remunerabor.[178]

Atticus died, full of years and honors, in the year 32 B.C. If he had only had the consideration to leave some memoirs for posterity, we should have much more satisfactory knowledge than is now possible concerning the relations of Roman authors with their publishers and with the public during the first century before Christ. We have not even, however, any of his letters to Cicero, letters which would of course have had a special interest in making clear the nature of his publishing arrangements with his authors.

In the year 48 B.C. appeared a work whose vitality has proved exceptional, and which, thanks to the school-boys, is to-day, nineteen hundred years after the death of its author, in continued demand. I refer to Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. This book could certainly have been made a magnificent “property” for its author, but as he was literally intent upon “wanting the earth,” the ownership of one book was hardly worth any special thought. As a fact, we have no details whatever of Cæsar’s publishing arrangements, although we do know that by means of some distributing machinery copies of the Commentaries speedily reached the farthest (civilized) corners of the Roman dominion.

Virgil’s Æneid was, we are told, given to the world through Varius and Tucca, about 18 B.C. The sixth book was read to Augustus and Livia in 22, the year of the death of Marcellus. The publication of the Æneid took place at a time when the machinery for the production and distribution of books was beginning to be adequately organized. It seems evident that it was only after the institution of the Empire that the publishers of Rome were in a position to reach with their editions any wide public outside of Rome and the principal cities of Italy.

About the year 40 B.C. the poet Horace, then twenty-five years old, came to Rome with the hope, as he states, of obtaining a living through literature. His estate at Venusia had been confiscated, owing to his having borne arms at Philippi on the defeated side, and he was now dependent upon his own exertions.[179] He found at Rome a literary circle of growing importance. It was the beginning of the Augustan age, and literature was the fashion with the court circles of the new Empire, and therefore with the society leaders who took the court fashions for their model. Through the kindness of Virgil, the young poet was introduced to Mæcenas, the wealthy statesman whose princely patronage of literature has become proverbial.

The liberality of Mæcenas supplied the immediate needs of the poet, and he appears never to have had an opportunity of finding out whether, apart from the aid of patronage, he could actually have supported himself through the sale of his poems. In fact, a little later, when for a time at least he possesses, through the friendship of Mæcenas, an assured income he appears to have taken the position of refusing to permit his books to be sold, and of writing only for the perusal of his friends.[180]

His first expectancy, however, in regard to the possibilities of a literary career, give grounds for the belief that at the time of the beginning of the Empire the publishing machinery of the capital was already adequately organized, and that the writers whom Horace found in Rome, including Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius, Varius, Valgius, and many others, were securing, apart from the gifts of the emperor or of other patrons of literature, some compensation from the reading public. On this point, however, Horace has himself given other evidence, which, if somewhat unsatisfactory concerning the matter of author’s compensation, is at least clear as to the existence of machinery for the making and distributing of books, and which also indicates that his resolution not to offer his books for sale had not been adhered to. He refers to the brothers Sosii as his publishers, and complains that while his works brought gold to them, for their author they earned only fame in distant lands and with posterity.